King Felix II and Knight-Captain Rhea escaped the prison complex under the cover of the desolate Lunio night. The Flow-Neutral Dust that marked their entry now became a blessing, confusing the trackers who were looking for an aesthetic escape signature.
Rhea, the Knight-Captain, was still recovering from the forced stillness but was focused. "We need to get to the nearest Flow nexus, Your Majesty. We have to communicate with Command Center."
"No," Felix said, his voice hard. "Evelyn is running the Command Center. Whether she is the traitor or merely incompetent, the Imperium is already at war based on Lunio's lies and a technical error. We cannot trust any intelligence flowing from the capital right now."
He focused his minimal Flow into a discreet, internal diagnostic.
"The Speaker mentioned the Original Felix's crimes. He mentioned having records. The Shadow's motive is tied to this past. I need to know why the man whose body I inhabit was such a bastard."
Felix used the last of his unstable Shame-Flow (the energy generated from the Memory of Cringe) to perform a targeted, high-risk scan of the nearby Lunio area. This was not an aesthetic search; it was a search for structural purity and historical permanence—the very things Lunio valued.
Kingly Skill Activated: Flow Resonance (Historical Trace)
He bypassed the sensory suppression fields by looking for the absence of noise. He found a massive, central point of Undivided Truth—an ancient, deeply shielded structure near the capital, not designed for magic, but for record-keeping.
"There," Felix pointed to a distant point on the desolate horizon. "It's Lunio's central archive. It won't have Flow shielding, but it will have the physical permanence of their puritanical history. If the truth about the Original Felix is anywhere, it's there."
They started moving across the desolate, sand-and-rock plains.
The Royal Archives of Lunio were a masterpiece of anti-aesthetic design: a perfectly featureless, massive cube of white marble that seemed to absorb all light and shadow. It was protected not by Flow shields, but by layers of bureaucratic and ideological defense—impossible locking mechanisms and a highly regimented patrol schedule designed to punish any deviation from the norm.
They slipped inside during the shift change, a window Rhea, the master of logistics, quickly identified.
Inside, the Archive was overwhelming in its silent vastness. Thousands of scrolls, books, and encoded plates lined sterile white shelves. This was the recorded history of the entire continent, filtered through the rigid, unforgiving lens of the Doctrine of Undivided Light.
Felix and Rhea found the records indexed by Contempt Rating—Lunio's internal scoring system for ideological impurity. They quickly navigated to the highest rating: "CRIMES OF THE FLOW-SEEKER DYNASTY (circa 200 years ago)."
Felix found the historical dossier on King Felix I (The Original). The record was detailed, cold, and horrifyingly true.
The Original King Felix was not just a vain monarch; he was a monster whose pursuit of Self-Actualized Focus led to profound cruelty.
The Subject Experiments: Felix I used his closest advisors and family as unwilling subjects in his early, chaotic Rituals of Gooning, attempting to force them to achieve his level of Focus, resulting in permanent psychic damage, madness, and disfigurement.
The Emotional Confiscation: When his most trusted advisor fell in love, Felix I viewed that emotional bond as an "unproductive drain on individual focus." He systematically, and publicly, destroyed the life of the advisor's beloved, using his royal power to exile, bankrupt, and ultimately erase the person, forcing the advisor to choose between Focus and Love.
The Victim's Identity: The advisor was a woman whose loyalty was unparalleled. The records didn't reveal her name, only her title: The Chief Strategist.
Felix I destroyed her capacity for normal emotion, leaving her with nothing but cold, ruthless ambition and a burning, deep-seated need for revenge against the Flow and the Aesthetic Imperium.
The horror was complete. Felix II (Grey) realized the truth: the Shadow was not some rogue madman; the Shadow was the traumatized victim of the Original Felix, now occupying a position of immense power, enacting a righteous revenge that would destroy the entire continent.
"The Chief Strategist..." Felix whispered, his face pale. "Rhea, we need to know who held that title during the Original King's reign."
Rhea accessed the internal archive records. Her hand started to shake as she read the name on the old, brittle scroll.
"The Chief Strategist, circa 200 years ago, was... Evelyn."
The Shadow's identity is now confirmed to the protagonist and the reader: Chief Evelyn (RC) is the vengeful victim of the Original King Felix I. They must escape the Archives immediately.